'Is it Donsela?' Ralph asked. 'He knew the law, Bazo.
He knows what the law says of those who steal the stones.'
'It was a small stone,' murmured Bazo, the words and blue smoke mingled on his lips. 'And fifteen years is a long time.'
'He is alive,' Ralph pointed out and took the cheroot that Bazo passed back to him. 'In the old days before the Diamond Trade Act, he would be dead by now.'
'He might as well be dead,' Bazo whispered bitterly.
'They say that men work like animals, chained like monkeys, on the breakwater wall at Cape Town harbour., He drew again on the cheroot and it burned down with a fierce little glow that scorched his fingers. He crushed it out on the workhardened calluses of his palm and let the shreds of tobacco blow away.
'And you, Henshaw, are you then so happy?' he asked quietly, and Ralph shrugged.
'Happy? Who is happy?'
'Is not this pit', with a gesture Bazo took in the mighty excavation over which they dangled, 'is not this your prison, does it not hold you as surely as the chains that hold Donsela as he places the rocks on the breakwater over the sea?'
They had almost reached the high stagings and Bazo slipped off his canvas covering before he could be spotted by one of the black constables who patrolled the area inside the new security fences.
'You ask me if I am unhappy.' Bazo stood up, and did not look at Ralph's face. 'I was thinking of the land in which I am a prince of the House of Kumalo. In that land the calves I tended as a boy have grown into bulls and have bred calves which I have never seen. Once I knew every beast in my father's herds, fifteen thousand head of prime cattle, and I knew each of them, the season of its birth, the twist of its horns and the markings of its hide.'
Bazo sighed and came to stand beside Ralph on the rim of the skip.
They were of a height, two tall young n, well formed, and each, in the manner of his race, becomely.
'Ten times I have not been with my impi when it danced the Festival of Fresh Fruits, ten times I did not witness my king throw the war-spear and send us out on the red road.'
Bazo's sombre mood deepened, and his voice sank lower.
'Boys have grown to men since I left, and some Of them wear the cowtails of valour on their legs and arms.'
Bazo glanced down at his own naked body with its single dirty rag at the waist. 'Little girls have grown into maidens, with ripe bellies, ready to be claimed by the warriors who have won the honour on the red road of war.' And both of them thought of the lonely nights when the phantoms came to haunt them. Then Bazo folded his arms across his wide chest and went on.
'i think of my father, and I wonder if the snows of age have yet settled upon his head. Every man of my tribe that comes down the road from the north brings me the words of Juba, the Dove, who is my mother.
She has twelve sons, but I am the first and the eldest of them.'
'Why have you stayed so long?' Ralph asked harshly.
'Why have you stayed so long Henshaw?' The young Matabele challenged him quietly, and Ralph had no answer.
'Have you found fame and riches in this hole?' Again they both glanced down into the pit, and from this height the off-shift waiting to come up in the skips were like columns of safari ants.
'Do you have a woman with hair as long and pale as the winter grass to give you comfort in the night, Henshaw? Do you have the music of your sons' laughter to cheer you, Henshaw? What keeps you here?'
Ralph lifted his eyes and stared at Bazo, but before he could find an answer the skip came level with the platform on the first ramp of the stagings. The jerk brought Ralph back to reality and he waved to his father on the platform above them.
The roar of the steam winch subsided. The skip slowed and Bazo led the party of Matabele workers onto the ramp. Ralph saw them all clear before he jumped across the narrow gap to the wooden platform and felt it tremble under the combined weight of twenty men.
Ralph signalled again. Then the winch growled, and the steel cable squealed in its sheaves. The heavy-laden skip ran on until it hit the striker blocks. Ralph and Bazo drove the jumper bars under it, and threw their full weight on them. The skip tipped over, and the load of gravel went roaring down the chute into the waiting cart.
Ralph looked up to see his father's encouraging smile and to hear his shouted congratulations.
'Well done, boy! Two hundred tons today!'
But the staging was deserted. Zouga had gone.
Zouga had packed a single chest, the chest that had belonged to Aletta and which had come up with her from the Cape. Now it was going back, and it was almost all that was going back.
Zouga put Aletta's Bible in the bottom of the chest, and with it her diary and the trinket box which contained the remaining pieces of her jewellery. The more valuable pieces had long ago been sold, to support the dying dream.
over these few mementoes he packed his own diaries and maps, and his books. When he came to the bundled pile of his unfinished manuscript, he paused to weigh it in his hand.
'Perhaps I shall find time to finish it now,' he murmured, and laid it gently in the chest.
On top of that went his clothing, and there was so little of that, four shirts, a spare pair of boots, barely an armful.
